


When It All Comes Down To Dust

by amorremanet



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Comfort Sex, Community: hc_bingo, Community: homebrewbingo, Community: kink_bingo, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s03e03 Gridlock, Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, Face of Boe!Jack, M/M, Silence Kink, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2017-11-10 09:50:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/464942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Before, he thought the nausea was from how far New Manhattan had fallen, but now he knows. It wasn't New New York, or anything about their air, or any sympathy for the injustices of it all. It was just biology. The Doctor's own biology taking over his senses, or attempting to, at least. Reacting to the Face of Boe. Reacting to a fixed point in time and space.</i>
</p><p><i>Reacting to Captain Jack Harkness.</i> (After the Master dies and Martha leaves, after the year that never was, the Doctor pays a visit to an old friend.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	When It All Comes Down To Dust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [secondplatypus](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=secondplatypus).



> Prompts used: "mistaken identity" for [hc_bingo](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/545264.html); "gags/silence" for [kink_bingo](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/546405.html); "forbidden pleasures" for [homebrewbingo](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/546632.html); and the, "love & passion, bruises/wounds, communication issues, simultaneous orgasm" postage stamp, also for [homebrewbingo](http://amor-remanet.livejournal.com/546979.html).

Something's changed about this situation. The Doctor feels it in the air as soon as his TARDIS touches down. He smells it as he crunches the stones and grass underneath his shoes—it's kind of salty? a bit sticky? the heady, thick and clobbering stench of knowing when something's not quite right. Not quite what one expects it to be, anyway.

It's a walk he's made before—thumping past all the lines of gawkers and caretakers, begging an audience with the Face of Boe. And although the time and place are different enough—the year five million and fifty, in the sector of New Earth known as New Greenland—the Doctor finds that it's all so familiar. Yet another place with vaulted ceilings and pristine floors and a crowd of onlookers, all of them in awe of the thing before them, whispering all of the rumors and canards about the being they've all gathered around, in the hopes of just glimpsing him, maybe hearing a single word from his massive lips.

Everything's the same, except that it isn't, because the Doctor can't even lose himself this time around. He can't get swept up in the rush of gossip that he has to push through in order to get anywhere close to the Face. He worms in between the different people—humans, and catkind, and a few assorted other species, from the brief glances that he steals—and he lets their words wash over him, but he can't join in on the fun. He can't even open his mouth to correct all of the misconceptions that he now recognizes. Just listening, instead of merely hearing, takes effort enough.

They say that the Face of Boe's a living legend, an indisputable reality, an incarnate impossibility, a fact. They say that the Face of Boe's lived for so long and come back to life, most recently after saving New Manhattan from itself. They ask how could he even do that—to do any of it at all—because they it's not possible for anyone to live for millions of years, is it. All of this time and they still can't decide whether or not the records and hearsay are accurate, whether or not they can trust all the different reports about the great Face that stretch like spiderwebs back through the whole, unknown course of their history.

They still can't decide if anyone could do what the Face of Boe's done.

Not all of what he's done, mind. Not that anyone even talks about his adventures and exploits anymore. They only care to ask after the big things, the so-called important things. How could the Face of Boe just keep going. How could he just press on through the whole of existence and never die. Is it something about him. Is it maybe something about his species. What _is_ his species in the first place because everybody's got a theory and everybody's theory's come to turn out wrong, even if they don't know that.

The Doctor could give them all the answers to those questions, now. He could if they were really interested. But they aren't. He doesn't need anyone to tell him so. They all think they want the answers, naturally, but the answers aren't as important to these people as the questions. The magnificent, wonderful questions.

And oh, how the questions keep piling up. Stacking themselves on each other like they could reach Utopia.

How could he live this long (however long it really is) and still exist, period, much less with a solid, physical form and independent thought, free will. How could he live this long and dodge the bullet of turning into a grasshopper or some other sort of ancient mythological nonsense. How long is _this long_ , aside from the vague answer of, _well, a very long time indeed_. Is it even possible for any lifeforms to live as long as the Face of Boe's purported to have lived—any of the myriad figures running around out there, even the smallest of them, seem so huge and so unfathomable… Is it possible to live that long.

Turns out, it very much is possible, though the Doctor keeps his voice silent and his mouth pressed in a tight line every time he hears someone mentioning it. They don't even know the half of what they're talking about, and in a way, he wishes that he didn't know either. Offhand, he waits for this—for all of this, all the storytelling and the myth-making and the active process of limited beings finding order in the universe—to lighten the load in his chest, make breathing come to him easier, or give him hope for the rest creation, the way that such things usually do.

Because it eases his mind, usually. The ability of people—whatever sort of people they might be—to survive. Not just the Face of Boe, but whole species staring down their own extinction, that awareness of how fundamentally meaningless their perspective says they are in the scheme of the whole universe… and then bouncing back. Going ahead and getting all nice and wrapped up in the trivia that really make up their threads in the fabric of creation—minutiae like what everyone has to say about the Face of Boe.

It's a relief. It's supposed to be, anyway, because it always is. Because it means the Doctor's work isn't meaningless. It means he's succeeded several times over, protected time and space, all the little planets and people, especially if they think they don't matter—and they thank him by living, by growing, by being true to their own species instead of fixating on the work of the Time Lords. He's supposed to feel better. It's supposed to be a relief.

But that relief never comes. It doesn't even start. No sparks of it. No breath catching in his throat. Not even the release of yelling at all of these simple-minded people to shut up. Nothing.

As the Doctor trudges forward, his steps take more effort. His chest weighs him down. Drags him into slouching forward. He buries his hands in his jacket pockets. Keeps his eyes down. Like holding up his head's too much work for him. Like his neck can't manage. Both his hearts pound harder, faster than he's known them to before. Even listening in on chatter gets too difficult. The conversations start sounding like radio static. He hears the noise but not the words. The words blink in, don't sound like anything but their parts, fade back to din and dust. Sound, but no tenor, no sense.

And through all of the tumult, one cluster of sensation emerges above all: a crawling along the Doctor's skin like insects trapped below the surface; a writhing so deep in his muscles that it scrapes his bones; a leaden twisting feeling in the pit of his stomach; a hot, sick flush on his cheeks and the back of his neck; the urge to just turn back and run to his TARDIS, go somewhere else, anywhere else but here.

Before, he thought the nausea was from how far New Manhattan had fallen, but now he knows. It wasn't New New York, or anything about their air, or any sympathy for the injustices of it all. It was just biology. The Doctor's own biology taking over his senses, or attempting to, at least. Reacting to the Face of Boe. Reacting to a fixed point in time and space.

Reacting to Captain Jack Harkness.

  
*******   


Of course, everything they're saying falls on ears that've heard it all before. Nothing new at all, strictly speaking—they've said it about the Face of Boe for eons now, passing the stories of him down to their children and their grandchildren, building up this idea of him that's not entirely wrong, but not entirely right, either. Misses the totality of him.

Folding his arms over his chest, nudging the door shut behind him with his foot, the Doctor supposes that that's what stories do, really. He ought to know. People tell enough of them about him. They miss the totality of their subjects in order to be more understandable.

"But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you," he says, and pauses, waits for the last of the great Face's caretakers to scurry out. Shakes his head and strolls up toward the Face. "You wouldn't know anything about missing the totality of things to make them _more_ understandable, would you, Jack?"

The Face blinks down at him—all inscrutable and barely moving—but says nothing, not even when the Doctor presses a hand against the glass surrounding him. And the Doctor could just smack him for going quiet now. He could kick himself, besides. All of the times he told Jack to shut up, to stop it, to keep quiet because right that instant wasn't the time for Jack to go flirting with some random, attractive humanoid… Now, here they are, and they have nothing to say to each other? It defies belief.

"What's the matter with you, Jack Harkness," he snaps. He knocks his fist into the glass, all but punches it, just to make the great Face flinch, since he won't open up and answer for himself already. "Are you still getting used to being alive after all—or maybe you just didn't expect to see me again? Is it that you're sick, or did you swallow something bad today? Stop me if I get any kind of close to it—"

The Doctor smacks the glass again, this time with his palm. He flinches himself from the dull, resounding noise it makes, and with a wobbling sigh, he lets his forehead clatter down to where, if not for the barrier between them, he'd be making physical contact with this man. The only man who can make him feel something so visceral as the desire scratching at the back of his mind like it wants to rend his flesh and make him bleed.

Even with the glass, the Doctor's hearts are racing—the two of them thundering at a rapid-fire pace, loudly enough that they ring in his ears—and the silence between them gets so still that he can hear every swishing motion of Jack's tentacles in the water, every slip of his great, cracked lips against each other. He can hear the oxygen bubbles popping at the surface of Jack's home; he can hear his own lungs straining as they have to remember to keep breathing. He could swear he hears his guts twisting themselves up in knots.

And he wonders how Jack can just float there in front of him—so still, so quiet, so unperturbed, without even the slightest hint of anxiety. Not even a bit of wobbling in his breath or a slight increase in his heartbeat.

"You knew," he whispers, winces at how his own voice cracks through the air like gunshot—like the gunshot that so recently took down a Time Lord—and shudders, swallows thickly. "Back in New New York, with what you told me… _You are not alone_? Clever little acronym, really. How long did it take you to come up with that one. Or did you remember Martha saying it, as though this whole bloody enterprise isn't a temporal paradox enough on its own."

The next words out of his mouth don't surprise him, but the accusatory tone they slip into certainly do: "You knew what the Master was going to do, Jack. You knew that he was still out there, you knew about Harold Saxon, you knew what I'd have to ask of Martha. You knew that he'd let Lucy kill him instead of letting me save him—everything that happened… _you knew it all_. And the only thing you bothered to tell me was so vague as not to mean anything?"

The tone is so surprising because the Doctor has no right to accuse Jack of anything, which, in so many words, Jack tries to point out to him.

"Different timelines," the Face says, in that deep, slow, craggy voice of his. The one that sounds so thoroughly different from the Jack Harkness whom the Doctor just left off in Cardiff. Seems impossible that they're the same person, even up so close to Jack, or the Face, or whichever one he thinks he is. "I couldn't tell you anything specific," he tells the Doctor, "or it would risk upsetting the fabric of everything. The whole of time and space—"

"But you could've _helped me_!" He snaps, startled at the anguish that comes out. "You could've helped me, Jack—you could've saved him, and our people, and… me. You could've saved _me_. Jack, why wouldn't you even _try_ to stop me from having to go through that? _Why_?"

This is petulance. Simple-minded, childish petulance—the same trait that keeps the Doctor thinking _what if I went back and saved Gallifrey_ , _what if I didn't have to let Rose go_ , _what if I could've told her how much I love her_ , _what if we could've saved her father without unsettling all reality_. Even without the desperate whine that creeps into the Doctor's voice—the one that he wouldn't admit to having, the one that he wouldn't let himself have, if he were around anyone else—there's nothing else this could be. But petulance. The sort of petulance that's supposed to get beaten out of young Time Lords at the Academy.

There's no sense in anyone knowing their own future. No sense in trying to prevent things that might upset the infinite temporal flux—and the Master's survival could have upset so many things, unsettled so many grounds and so many lives—the Doctor sighs, dragging his fingers down the glass and letting his hand curl in around itself. He hears a heaving sound coming out of his chest, lurking behind his breathing, and it doesn't seem to fit with how weak his breath feels. And he _knows_ that he has no right to ask any of these things of Jack. That Jack was in the right, just doing his part to preserve the integrity of reality's fabric.

But Jack upsets the very nature of reality by just existing—he's facts, inflexible, undying and unchanged by everything else in the infinite flux—he is _never supposed to happen_. Having reality take another one on the chin is selfish, something that the Doctor can't even think to ask of the universe—it's just this pain making him wish that he could get away with that—but still, the prospect's so appealing… The urge to ask Jack what other secrets he's sitting on, what other things he hasn't told the Doctor about his future… It's still there, in the back of his mind, and he can almost hear it _really_ scratching at him. Not just doing so metaphorically—the Doctor can almost hear real talons scraping down real bone.

"Is it because I didn't tell you what you were?" the Doctor says when the silence claws at his eardrums too much, utterly failing to keep his voice at any sort of even keel. It's terrifying, just how upset this makes him and just how unsteady his voice gets. "Was it out of _revenge_ , Jack? Because I left you alone back there and I knew that you could never die, and finally, after millions upon untold _millions_ of years, you get the upper-hand? You know something I don't and you can keep it from me? Put me through the same kind of pain that you felt."

And it makes both of his hearts skip a beat, but… the Doctor wouldn't mind this being the truth. He wouldn't mind Jack just wanting to take revenge on him, acting out the same hurt that the Doctor enacted on him, even after all the time that passed. That'd be the _human_ thing to do. The emotional thing. The stupidly, irrationally gut-instinct thing. The reasons might not be noble, but at least they'd be better than what the Doctor sees when he blinks down into Jack's enormous, black eyes.

His own reflection. Not just the physical one—not just the reflection of his face—but also a look that he recognizes from seeing it so often in himself. The resignation of being alive for so long, and seeing so much, watching the people that you love all slip out through your fingers, getting away from you before you can so much as think of stopping them. The faraway look of someone who can see the strings, see all the ways that everything is bound to everything else, that everyone is important because the smallest changes can have enormous consequences.

And the Doctor realizes that he can't even judge Jack's actions—or his lack thereof. He can't judge Jack for keeping what he knew to himself in the name of preserving the timeline. He can't presume to know what Jack's thinking, not when Jack's been alive for so many millions of years, for so much longer than the Doctor. The Doctor's seen all the strings and the whole course of time, but he's a Time Lord; the human mind isn't built to take that sort of abuse.

The Doctor thumps his palm on the glass again. He opens his mouth to say something else—if he could even think of what to say to Jack, because _I'm so sorry_ doesn't feel like it goes far enough (then again, it never does). And _I never wanted anything like this for you_ seems too maudlin, even considering everything. And the Doctor refuses to say, _You were right: you were much better off as a coward_ because he refuses to validate any of Jack's old behavior (or to invalidate any of the good things that Jack did during his stint with Torchwood)—but he's going to find the right words. He's intent on saying something to this fellow legend, this man who shouldn't exist but does.

Instead, he finds something warm and wet and slippery brushing against his cheek, then down and over his lips. He wrinkles his nose, blinks up at the tentacle peeking out of the tub. He tilts his head down at Jack and hears him whisper, _Don't speak_ —and the Doctor shudders, groans underneath Jack's touch. He's never been happier for leave to just shut up.

Not just because he can't find the words he wants, but because this briefest bit of contact from Jack sets his head reeling, leaves him feeling sick to the stomach and weak at the knees, sends him slumping into the glass—but when Jack asks if he wants him to stop, the Doctor shakes his head in lieu of speaking. It's better without words. It's better when he can hear the way his chest heaves with every breath and the way his hearts pound as Jack snakes his tentacle around, slithers it down the back of the Doctor's neck. It's better when he can feel the shivering all the way down to the pit of his stomach.

He's not sure what to do with himself. Not when Jack's taking care of everything—unbuttoning the Doctor's shirt and jacket, nudging them off his shoulders and to the floor, undoing his trousers and getting rid of them, flicking his tentacles against the Doctor's skin in every place that he can get to, without any apparent pattern to the motions… None at all, save that the tentacles hit the Doctor's hips, and back, and stomach like kisses—even down to being warm like the inside of a mouth. They don't just move against him; they caress him, sliding over his collarbone and around his waist, his thighs, the base of his erect dick.

Jack takes special care with the tentacle that wriggles down the Doctor's spine, ghosts over his buttocks and between them, slowly working its way into him. The Doctor gasps and it crashes through the silence. He groans both from the sensation of fullness, of Jack's tentacle straining inside of him; and from the sensation of Jack (warm, and slick, and _so good_ ) working around his insides—and as he tries to angle his hips and work himself further down the length of it, he finds another tentacle trailing along his bottom lip.

And he kisses it, for lack of any other ideas. He moves his lips around it, tries to suck more of it into his mouth as Jack's other tentacle grips harder onto his dick, strokes the length of it, up and down in long, smooth motions.

And his whole body's writhing, worming around the same way that Jack's tentacles do inside of him, around his dick, all across his skin. His muscles twist and burn with the desire to call this off. He can almost hear them doing so, rubbing up on each other and squirming. Because it's wrong, a Time Lord and a fixed point in time. Because Jack's whole life is wrong, after that point—and yet his hearts don't want that. The Doctor doesn't want any of this to stop, not even while Jack's motions work him up. He just wants Jack. All of Jack—he presses into the glass between them, even though he can't get through it, all for the thought that he could get even closer, all so he can stare into Jack's eyes.

The Doctor works his mouth around the tentacle in the same sorts of motions—tightening his lips here, scraping his teeth against it there. Because for all the uncertainty, the Doctor can't just let this go without reciprocation. Not when Jack's so busy and so intent on making this good for him. Not when Jack's made it so much easier to work through this—they work through it as they work each other over, wordlessly, both of them sliding and working around each other, finding a slow rhythm of backs and forths, ins and outs—

And if Jack makes any noise inside of his container, the Doctor can't hear any of it. He doesn't need to, either. It's enough just to watch his face contort, to watch his brow wrinkle, his eyes slip shut, and his mouth fall open as orgasms take them and they cum together.


End file.
